Inequality and rebellion
Rashed Rahman
Senate Chairman Raza Rabbani delivered a stirring message to
the working class and the people generally at a seminar in Karachi the other
day. The Senate Chairman thereby stood out as one of the few exceptions within
the PPP and the political class as a whole as a man of abiding conviction in
favour of the oppressed. Rabbani called for a broad alliance of workers, other
oppressed groups (amongst whom could be included peasants, students, women,
minorities, et al), and individuals to launch a struggle for the restoration of
the law, which he considered essential to guarantee the rights of the working
class, denied through the contract labour system. He pointed out that the
people as a whole have little strength to wrest their rights because their
power has been incrementally weakened by past military regimes. He warned that
states in which the rights of workers and the middle class were in question and
could not be resolved with all its institutions would face existential issues.
Raza Rabbani dilated upon the role of workers, students and
the ‘coffee culture’ of our society in fuelling resistance to dictatorship,
mass movements and the struggle for citizens’ rights. The countrywide (then
including East Pakistan) mass movement in 1968-69 toppled the seemingly
immovable Ayub regime. Ziaul Haq therefore reserved his special oppressive
measures against the working class, students, and the houses of intellectual
ferment that informed dissent and resistance in the shape of tea and coffee
restaurants.
The weakening of the people’s resistance has led, Rabbani
argued, to the rise in enforced disappearances, a tragic affliction in today’s
Pakistan. Governments, whether civilian elected or military dictatorships, are
oblivious to the people’s problems until some mayhem is generated. He also
pointed to the need for the workers to hold accountable the anti-labour leaderships
of ‘pocket unions’, a prerequisite for regaining past strength. Parliamentarians,
he concluded (on a somewhat optimistic note), must play their role in support
of the people.
The seminar, convened to celebrate the Supreme Court verdict
of December 8, 2017 declaring the contract labour system illegal and
unconstitutional, saw former Supreme Court Bar Association president Rasheed A
Rizvi argue for workers to not confine themselves to court battles but fight
for their rights in the streets. He said pre-partition anti-worker provisions,
including the contract labour system, were continued after independence. Unfortunately,
he concluded, after the 18th Amendment, the provincial Assemblies legalised
the contract labour system.
There is a lot of weight in the views quoted above.
Pakistan’s history is punctuated by the struggles of workers, peasants,
minorities, women, students and youth against an iniquitous system that rewards
wealth with even more wealth and leaves the hewers of wood and drawers of
water, the wretched of the earth, victims of exploitation, defined in political
economy as the extraction of surplus (unpaid) labour as the foundation of
profit under capitalism.
An Oxfam report released recently says the richest one
percent of the world received 82 percent of the wealth created last year. It
says the ‘billionaire boom’ has seen the wealth of billionaires grow six times
faster than that of ordinary workers since 2010, with another billionaire
minted every two days between March 2016 and March 2017. Oxfam paints a picture
of a global economy in which the wealthy few amass ever-greater fortunes while
billions of people struggle to survive on poverty pay. Oxfam Executive Director
Winnie Byanyima says, “The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy
but a symptom of a failing economic system.”
Historically, capitalism transformed society by concentrating
workers from scattered peasant backgrounds in the rural areas into factories,
cities and towns. The conditions of work and life in the slums of the poor
spontaneously gave birth to trade unionism and workers’ social clubs. Pakistan
too experienced a similar trend after independence when successive regimes,
civilian and military, embraced the capitalist free market model as the best
vehicle for development. Early industrialisation received a tremendous fillip
during the Ayub 1958-68 decade, with the state giving away state-created
industries and businesses to blue-eyed boys from the elite, and adopting
policies that favoured the landed elite and private business, thereby giving
rise to the concentration of wealth embodied in the rise of the ’22 families’. This
model produced regional and class contradictions, the latter feeding into the
1968-69 movement, the latter ending in the denouement of East Pakistan’s
separation and re-emergence as Bangladesh.
Taking account of the role played by (initially) students,
workers and peasants in the 1968-69 movement, successor regimes, particularly
the Zia dictatorship, weakened the last two by repression and banned the
student unions in 1984. With a collapsed peasant movement and immeasurably
weakened trade unions, the path was clear for capitalists (not only in
Pakistan) to mitigate the effects of the concentration of large numbers of
workers under one factory roof by outsourcing, home based employment, and the
contract labour system. The results of these anti-labour policies today are
that less than one percent of the working class is organised in trade unions,
while 73 percent of workers are employed under the contract labour system, a contrivance
that ensures they have no rights, not even those enshrined in the law and
constitution. The ban on student unions while allowing fascist student organisations
like the Jamaat-i-Islami’s Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba (IJT) to rule the roost has
by now morphed into students being organised ‘informally’ on ethnic lines,
ensuring an overarching student movement like in the past becomes a remote possibility.
Underlying the lost strength of the people in the past was a
strong and relatively effective Left. Its collapse left the people,
particularly oppressed sections, without an effective champion or voice of the
oppressed. The realisation of the need for recreating that champion has been
slow in dawning on the remaining Left parties and groups. One positive was the
coming together of 10 such parties in Lahore some weeks ago to explore the
ground for cooperation and more. However, they and the broader Left, including
the ‘floating Left’ composed of individuals, still have a long way to go before
their weight in national affairs becomes hard to ignore.
These parties and groups have tended to concentrate on
strengthening their own party ranks, a slow and uncertain enterprise in current
times, while largely ignoring the critical need to create mass organisations on
the basis of the demands of various categories of the oppressed. Second, and
perhaps equally important, they succumbed to the mood of defeat and retreat
that became a fact of life for the Left in the 1980s, and exacerbated after the
fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The critical need therefore for updating
their knowledge of the changed world (and Pakistan) in the 21st
century and the implications of this for theory and strategy remained an
unfulfilled duty.
Unbridled capitalism since 1991 has produced a rash of
crises and negative phenomena. These range from the crash of 2008-09 to
unfettered imperialist wars, racial and religious hatreds and terrorism. The
trend is towards a barbaric world, in which might is right is asserted,
although not without being resisted. Why has rebellion not broken out against
this unjust trend? Rebellion is not something that usually springs blindly from
mere deprivation, poverty and oppression. It requires conviction resting on a
worldview that promises a future better than the present. The only solution therefore
for the present trends towards a more and more barbaric world is to restate
(with a critique of the shortcomings and mistakes of the socialist project in
the 20th century) the case for a world based on economic, social and
political justice and equality, a vision only achievable under socialism.
rashed-rahman.blogspot.com
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